


all i know is we said hello

by rire



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Alternate Universe - Children, Angst, Family, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Kid Fic, M/M, Mentions of homophobia, also there isn't really romance since they're like 8 years old, mentions of minor charadeath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 10:08:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7753489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rire/pseuds/rire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don’t know you,” Keith says.</p><p>“Well, you should,” the boy says emphatically. His skin is the colour of caramel. Keith likes caramel. The boy points a caramel-coloured thumb at himself. “I’m Lance McClain. I’m the coolest kid on this side of the playground! And I’m going to be a pilot when I grow up.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	all i know is we said hello

The first time Keith sees Lance is on his first day of school. Not everyone else’s first day. Just Keith’s. It’s his third school this year. He supposes that fits the pattern, since he’s in third grade. Last year, in second grade, he went to two schools. Maybe next year it’ll be four.

The teacher had introduced him in front of the class and he had seen a sea of unfamiliar faces, some smiling, some uninterested. He vaguely remembered the kid with the short brown bangs as one of the kids who smiled. That same kid approached him at recess with a tap on the shoulder and a toothy grin (save for one missing front tooth).

“Hey Keith!” the boy says. “Come play tag with us!”

“Why?” Keith says. He’s surprised the boy remembers his name.

The boy scowls. “What do you mean why?”

Keith thinks that it’s not very practical to ask him, when he’s going to move schools when he gets new foster parents and then they will need to find another person to play with. But he supposes this boy doesn’t know that. “I don’t know you,” he says.

“Well, you _should_ ,” the boy says emphatically. His skin is the colour of caramel. Keith likes caramel. The boy points a caramel-coloured thumb at himself. “I’m Lance McClain. I’m the coolest kid on this side of the playground! And I’m going to be a pilot when I grow up.”

“Yeah, right,” one of the other kids sneers. His hair is banana yellow. “You’re just a crybaby. Just yesterday you fell and hurt your knee and you were crying like a baby.”

“No way!” Lance crosses his arms and puffs his chest out. “That was someone else. I’m a real man. I never cry! Do you want to play tag with us or not?”

“Okay, I guess,” Keith says.

“You’re it,” Banana Boy says, socking him on the shoulder. Two minutes later Keith has outrun and caught Lance as well as all four of his friends.

“I don’t like playing tag with him,” Banana Boy says to Lance.

There’s a sparkle in Lance’s eyes. “I do,” he says. He walks up to Keith and taps him on the shoulder, flashing him a grin. “From now on we’re rivals,” he declares. “And I’m going to beat you in tag one day.”

 

-

 

The next time Keith sees Lance, he is crying.

The big tree casts a shadow over him. He looks small, hunched over like that, way smaller than the size of his ego the other day. His bunched-up form trembles once in a while, and lets out a sniffle, and that’s how Keith knows Lance is crying.

Keith runs over, his feet kicking up the dust. He looks Lance up and down. Both of his knees are intact.

“Why are you crying?” he asks.

He receives only a sniffle in response. Sniffles are not a good sound, Keith decides. They sound like your nose is filled with snot. He liked Lance from yesterday better. He pokes Lance’s arm with his finger. “Why are you crying?” he repeats.

“Probably because he got a paper cut or something,” Banana Boy— whose name Keith learned was Mike— laughs, then runs off.

Lance’s voice is small when he speaks up. “My _abuelita_ …” He hiccups and his bottom lip trembles. “She went somewhere really far away and she’s never going to come back.”

“Oh,” Keith says, biting his lip. He knows how to treat a skinned knee— with a band-aid— but he doesn’t know how to treat someone whose relative died. He fidgets with his hands a bit, then settles for patting Lance on the back.

“I can’t tell Mike,” Lance says quietly. “His mom and dad and grandma and grandpa are all living with him. He doesn’t know how I feel. He’s just gonna laugh at me.”

Keith fidgets. “Well I don’t really know how you feel either. I mean my parents went somewhere far too but I was really small, so I don’t remember them.”

“Oh.” Lance’s shoulders sag. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to say sorry,” Keith shrugs. ‘Sorry’ is what you say when something is your fault, but it isn’t Lance’s fault that he doesn’t have real parents. But Lance looks really upset, so he changes the topic, racking his brain for anything. “Hey, Lance. You want to be a pilot, right?”

Lance nods.

“Where do you want to fly?”

Lance’s face lights up. “Outer space!”

“People who go to space are called astronauts,” Keith says. “Pilots fly planes and stuff. I guess you could fly to Hawaii. Or Korea.”

Lance looks like he’s going to cry again, so Keith changes the subject a second time. “I’m from Korea. Where are you from?”

“Cuba,” Lance says, brightening up again. “There are beaches there. Have you been to a beach?”

Keith shakes his head no. “Not that I can remember.”

“It’s super cool. You have to see it sometime. I’m going there again in the summer. Have you ever heard a shell?”

“Shells don’t make sounds.”

“Yes they do.” Lance clutches a hand to his chest, hurt. “When you put them to your ear they make ocean sounds. Okay, that’s it, I’ve decided. You’re coming to Cuba with me!”

 _I won’t be here in the summer,_ Keith thinks, but Lance’s tone of voice leaves no room for argument. So he says, “Okay.”

 

-

 

Lance seems to take a liking to Keith after this. They continue to play tag together every recess and lunch. When it’s story time, he always sits next to Keith. At lunch, he always shares his Dunkaroos with Keith. “Wow,” Lance would say in a weirdly exaggerated voice. “My mom accidentally brought me two again!” It’s not until a week later that Keith realizes that this continuous string of accidents is not, in fact, accidental. But by then he’s already developed a healthy addiction to Dunkaroos and he can’t say no to them anyway.

Keith doesn’t know what this all means. All he knows is that he’s suddenly found an indispensable presence attached to him at the hip. He doesn’t know if he likes it or not, but he doesn’t really have a choice.

Lance starts introducing Keith to the other kids in his class as his “friend.” Keith thinks he likes that word. It’s one of the words on the spelling list and Keith has it memorized, but he doesn’t like that ‘end’ is part of the word. Nonetheless, he manages to ace his first spelling test since entering the class. And also his first multiplication test. This prompts Lance to stand up from his chair and point a finger at him. “I’m gonna beat you, Keith,” Lance shouts. “My archrival!”

The teacher makes him sit down.

After school Keith says, “You said we were rivals and then you said we were friends. So which one are we?”

Lance snorts like it’s obvious. “We’re both, you dummy.”

Keith purses his lips. People are confusing. Or maybe just Lance. “I didn’t know it worked like that.”

“Well, that’s ‘cause I’m smarter than you. I know everything.”

 

-

 

After school they hang around on the playground, waiting for Lance’s older sister Maria, who is in middle school, to come and pick up Lance and his other sister Isabel, who is in the first grade, so that they can all walk home together. It’s one day when Maria arrives that the idea strikes Lance.

“Keith, wanna walk home with us?”

Keith shakes his head no. “I like to stay here till no one’s here because it’s quiet. Plus your house is in the opposite direction from mine.”

“No, I mean, come over to my house,” Lance says, grabbing hold of his hand. “‘Cause if we’re going to go to Cuba together you should get to know my family.”

“Oh,” Keith says, a little taken aback. “Is that okay?”

“You’re taking _him?”_ Isabel shrieks indignantly. Keith is rather confused and maybe a little hurt until Isabel continues, “You just told _me_ yesterday you were going to push me off the plane and I’m your _sister!”_

“Because you ate my last Oreo!” Lance cries out.

“It didn’t have your _name_ on it!”

“Oh, shut up,” Maria says, rolling her eyes. “We’re all going together. And yeah, you can come over,” she says to Keith. “It’s not like one extra kid in the house makes any difference anymore.”

 

-

 

As it turns out, one extra kid makes a whole lot of difference. Keith had kind of expected to blend in, but the minute he walks in three more pairs of eyes are on him.

The first sound he hears is a shriek. Not elicited by Keith himself— it seems like the baby, Samuel, had already been crying before he entered. The second is more of an animated yell. That sound is from Lance’s other sister, Gabriela, who looks to be about four years old. She runs over, gets on her tiptoes, and grabs a handful of Keith’s hair. “It’s _so_ fluffy!”

Keith stands there, feeling like a fish out of water. “Gabriela,” Lance’s mother admonishes from her spot on the couch, the baby in her lap. “What did I say about touching other people’s hair!” She looks over at Keith. Her eyes sparkle and her face lights up with a smile. “Hello, hello! Welcome!”

“Mama, this is Keith, he’s my friend from school,” Lance helpfully provides.

Lance’s Mom hands Samuel over to Maria and comes over. Keith knows he should say something, but he doesn’t know what. She saves him the effort of thinking when she ruffles his hair and pinches his cheeks.

“You’re too, too skinny,” she proclaims with a warm, booming voice. “I knew it, Dunkaroos are not enough to feed a growing boy.”

“He brings a lunch every day,” Lance says. “If we feed him too much, he’ll barf.”

“Shush,” his mother replies. “Come. I made _empanadas._ Eat until your stomach is bursting.”

And then he’s helplessly dragged over to the dinner table. Within minutes his mouth is crammed full of what has to be the most delicious food he’s ever had— at the loudest dinner table he’s ever been at. He likes the quiet, is used to it, and doesn’t quite know what to make of this. Lance’s Mom asks him about himself, and there’s not much to say except he’s Keith and in the third grade and he’s from Korea but he doesn’t remember it much. And then Maria is tugging at his sleeve and asking him if he’s heard of this supposedly famous boy band but he’s too busy avoiding the crumbs Samuel is currently flinging everywhere to recall a band by that name.

Lance says, “Why would he care about your ugly Korean dudes?”

“They are _not_ ugly. They are way more beautiful than you will ever be! Besides, that means you’re calling Keith ugly too.”

“Keith is totally good-looking! He’s way better looking than those idiots you taped on the wall.”

Keith gives up on keeping up with the conversation and focuses his efforts on pulling out the pink scrunchies Gabriela has somehow managed to tie into his hair while he was distracted. But the minute he touches them she starts to cry, so he gives up on that, too.

Later, when Keith gets back to the house he’s staying in, he stuffs a mouthful of Dunkaroos in his mouth and thinks they taste sort of like _empanadas_.

 

-

 

Much to Keith’s joy, _empanadas_ and loud dinner tables become a regular thing. In other words, he finds himself over at Lance’s house about as often as he’s in his own. A week or so later, they’re sitting on the floor in the siblings’ shared room, building spaceships out of Legos.

“You know how you said pilots can’t go to space?”

Keith tilts his head. “Yeah?”

Lance grins, smug. “Well I found out that you can be a pilot in space! I mean of course, right? Who do you think pilots the spaceships? So I’ve decided I’m gonna be a space pilot. And so are you. And we’re gonna go to space together.”

“You can’t decide that for me,” Keith crosses his arms, but for a moment the image of him and Lance piloting spacecrafts among the stars flashes before him, and it actually looks pretty cool.

“Yeah I can. We’re friendrivals and that means we do everything together. Also I’m going to be the fastest pilot in the world and even better than you.”

“Sure,” says Keith. “Keep dreaming,” he adds, because it’s fun to watch Lance sulk and stick out his tongue.

“I will! I so will!” He picks up his Lego spaceship and does a swoopy flying motion. “This is Lance, your head pilot speaking. Evil overlord at twelve o’clock and we are about to take him down, _pow pow pow!”_ Then, in a girl’s voice, he croons, “Wow, look, it’s Lance McClain. I wish he would take _me_ on his ship.”

Keith snorts. “Those don’t even sound like laser beams.” He picks up his spaceship and flies toward the evil overlord, making a series of much more accurate sounds.

“No way, Keith, you are not gonna steal my show,” Lance declares, making another exaggerated swooping motion— a little too high, and knocks over a pile of artifacts on his desk. “Oh, shoot.” He drops his ship and begins to tidy them up, then stops, picking up a conch-shaped seashell and turning it over in his hand.

“Hey, watch this,” he exclaims, grabbing it and holding it up to his ear. He nods confidently. “Told you it sounds like the ocean. Listen!”

He holds the shell up to Keith’s ear, but all Keith can hear is the rise and fall of Lance’s breathing, next to him.

“Nope. Don’t hear it,” Keith says, and Lance huffs indignantly.

“You’re just not trying hard enough. Anyway, you can have this one to practice with, until we go to Cuba.” He shoves the shell into Keith’s hand, and turns his attention back to the Lego.

The shell finds its permanent place on Keith’s temporary nightstand.

 

-

 

Just when Keith thinks he’s gotten used to Lance, just when Keith thinks he’s figured Lance out, Lance does something really confusing.

It’s recess time and they’re playing hide and seek. Their hiding spot under the slides is really bad and Keith thinks they’ll be discovered any minute, but Lance doesn’t mind because he says he likes that spot. They’re sitting side by side, cross-legged, when out of the blue Lance presses a kiss to Keith’s cheek.

Keith’s face immediately grows hot. On instinct, he jerks away. “What did you do that for?” he stammers.

“People do that to people they like,” Lance says, like it’s completely obvious. “My mom does that to me and my siblings. My mom likes me. I like you— ow!”

Keith doesn’t see the rock being thrown until it hits Lance in the back, but then he turns to see Mike with a disgusted look on his face. Out of Mike’s mouth comes a nasty word Keith hasn’t heard before but somehow knows the meaning of.

“Oh yeah,” Lance says, puffing out his chest as his eyes water. “Well you're a—" He breathes in. "You're a— ”

The smug look on Mike’s face only grows, and Lance’s face only threatens to crumple. So Keith does the only thing he can— he storms up to Mike and punches him in the face.

He gets sent to the office. The principal makes him and Mike apologize to each other. His foster parents say they'll send him away if he does that again. That night, he lies in bed, stares up at the ceiling, and wonders if Lance’s cheek would taste like caramel.

 

-

 

A few days later Lance has all but forgotten about the incident. The only thing he remembers is that Keith is good at fighting, and that earns him new respect in Lance’s eyes. He invites Keith over again and gives him a lightsaber made of cardboard and challenges him to a duel, which Keith wins. Then he challenges Keith to three more rematches, all of which Keith also win.

Tired and sprawled out on the lawn, Lance absentmindedly picks up a tuft of grass in his hand. He digs his fingers into the dirt in the ground. Then he gasps and looks over at Keith.

“I have an idea. You know what we should do?”

Keith is used to hearing those words by now, and the way they make him excited every time. “What?”

“We should bury a time capsule right here in my backyard.”

The words _time capsule_ tug at Keith’s chest in a way he doesn’t understand. “What?” he forces out.

“A time capsule. The kind where you bury your treasures underground and then dig them up in a few years. Gee, I really am smarter than you.”

Keith wants to explain himself, but before he can respond Lance has pulled him to his feet and dragged him back to his room. Suddenly his throat is closed up and he doesn’t know how to speak, just watches Lance pull out a little shoebox, throw in some random artifacts rummaged from his drawers— a sock, a candy wrapper, a five-cent coin. Then he cuts up a piece of paper, and start writing a message to his future self.

After a while, Lance folds it up and then cuts up a new piece, holding it out to Keith.

Keith doesn’t take it.

Lance cocks his head curiously. “Don’t you wanna write anything?”

“I can’t.”

“Yeah right,” Lance says. “I know you know how to write! You beat me in every spelling test!”

“That’s not what I mean— I can’t,” he says, and doesn’t know why he suddenly feels like crying. “I can’t do any of this. I can’t bury a time capsule with you. I can’t be space pilots with you and go to outer space. I can’t go to Cuba with you in the summer because I’m not going to be here!”

He’s shaking a little from blurting out all of those pent-up emotions. Lance looks downright shocked. So he makes himself quiet down a little. “I’m not going to be here in the summer. I don’t even know if I’ll be here for the next month. Whenever I get new parents, I’m going to have to pack my things and go wherever they send me.”

“So you’re just going to give up?”

Keith steps back, hit with the impact of Lance’s words. The words are laced with anger and something else that Keith can’t quite put his finger on. Lance grits his teeth and grabs Keith by the collar.

“So you’re just going to give up on all our dreams? You’re not even going to try? That’s not the Keith I know. That’s not the Keith who’s my best friendrival! Even if you move away, even if you go back to Korea, even if you move to another planet, that’s not gonna change.”

Lance’s voice wobbles, and Keith feels something prickle at the back of his eyes. Lance turns away and grabs a felt marker off his desk, then turns back to Keith. “Hold out your arm.”

Keith blinks. “What? Why?”

“Just do it!”

Keith does. Lance takes him by the wrist, his grip firm. With his right hand, he writes ten huge digits that sprawl over Keith’s entire forearm.

“That’s my phone number,” Lance says, capping the pen and flashing Keith a proud smile. “I’m gonna write it on your arm every single morning when you come to school so it never goes away and even if you go far away, you’ll never forget about me. You’ll always remember to call me because all you have to do is look down.”

Keith looks down at Lance’s messy writing, ink spreading into his skin, and smiles.

“I don’t think I could forget about you if I tried,” he says honestly.

Lance smiles back. He looks like the sun, and Keith knows for a fact that there’s no way he’ll ever forget that smile.

 

-

 

So it turns out Lance is really very stupid, because all Keith has to do is shower to wash away the digits on his arm. It’s a good thing Keith is smarter than Lance because when he gets to his new house, which is an hour away, the first thing he does is write the number on a piece of paper and tape it to his wall.

The next three months sort of fly by. When he doesn’t phone Lance, Lance phones him. Lance tells him all about how great school is, and how he’s top of the class now that Keith is gone, but when he says it he sounds suspiciously close to tears. Keith’s new parents let him talk on the phone every day, which is good for him and for them. It spares them the trouble of having to converse with him.

The kids at his new school are okay. They don’t talk to him all that much. They don’t invite him to go to Cuba on the second day of meeting him. They don’t challenge him to duels and ask him to bury time capsules. But that was always just a Lance sort of thing anyway. At home— no, at his new house— he puts the shell Lance gave him to his ear and tries to hear the ocean but all he can hear is Lance’s voice, saying, _“and we’re gonna go to space together.”_

 

-

 

When they tell him he’s moving again he packs his stuff wordlessly. With everything else, he brings the shell and piece of paper with Lance’s phone number (which he doesn’t really need, because he has it memorized by now).

The road looks a little familiar. He suspects he’s in a town he’s been to before. That suspicion grows into certainty when the car stops on a driveway right next to Lance’s house and his heart stops, because it’s way too good to be true. But all the lights are off at Lance's house and there’s no car in their driveway and his heart sinks.

Until he meets his new parents, and they do something that none of the others have done before— they wrap their arms around him and squeeze him in a tight hug. They smell nice, like grass and flowers and fresh laundry, and their smiles are warm like a late spring day. He has an older brother, too. His name is Shiro and he’s tall and handsome and good at soccer, and more than happy to play with Keith.

Keith gets hungry after a few soccer matches, so they go back inside to eat. When Shiro opens the cupboards, Keith holds his breath because it’s stacked right to the top with Dunkaroos. “We heard you like them,” Shiro explains.

Shiro tells him lots of things, such as that Mom and Dad are really great and he’s been here for over two years now. Shiro also says he should meet the McClain family next door because they’re really nice but they’re away on a family trip right now, and (a little surprised) that yes, Keith can visit them first thing tomorrow.

That night, curled up in bed, Keith allows himself to think the one thought he never did— that he might be here to stay.

 

-

 

The next day, Keith asks his parents for an old shoebox. In it, he puts the seashell, the piece of paper with Lance’s phone number, a sizeable rock he picked up off the ground (on which he wrote ‘Mike can suck it’ with permanent marker), a Dunkaroo wrapper, and a handwritten personal message to his future self.

Carrying the box in his arms, he runs to the house next door and gets on his tiptoes to ring the doorbell.

“It’s Keith,” Maria’s voice rings out from inside. “Lance, it’s Keith!”

Then a familiar voice: “Dios mío!”

Footsteps scrambling, hurrying towards the door, which is flung open to reveal a sunshine smile.

“Keith! It’s really you! What are you doing here?”

Keith holds out the shoebox and says, “I want to bury a time capsule.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! hope you enjoyed it! you can find me on twitter @redbeantofu :)


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